Author Archives: Ross Rinehart

Ray Raposa of Castanets has never allowed convention to determine his life or his music.

On 2000’s “The Covers Record,” Cat Power, the alias for singer-songwriter Chan Marshall, traded in the shambolic indie rock of her early career for a less-is-more aesthetic, playing nearly every song with a piano or guitar, unaccompanied.

For UCLA students, it can be particularly easy to remain within the bubble of Westwood.

Raymond Raposa, under the moniker “Castanets,” makes country-folk of the most introverted and morose variety. His hoarse, Dylan-esque voice carries the pathos of a tortured soul.

Portland-based band Blitzen Trapper may remind listeners of Radiohead, not because of their sound but because of their penchant for self-released albums. The sextet, playing tonight at the El Rey Theatre, has self-released three albums of fractured alt-country on their own label, Lidkercow Ltd., after forming officially in 2000.

Common conceptions of jazz music typically evoke images of time-tested, weary performers in small, dimly-lit bars of the 1950s and ’60s.

When sequencing the excerpts to be performed at tonight’s Opera Gala, Neal Stulberg, director of the UCLA Philharmonia, resorted to a tactic all too familiar to any student who has attempted to construct an exhaustively researched paper. Instead of note cards, though, he used leaflets of paper with various excerpts from popular operas to determine the succession of pieces for the gala.